Secret Project 1: Results

I've been meaning to write this up all week but a few things have gotten in the way. However, finally, here is the first ~Secret Project~. Was that mysterious enough? Maybe not. Mystery however, was a part of the secret project.

It started on Facebook with a bet, of sorts, with my brother Graham. He had the idea of adding all of each others friends to see who would accept the request. I said this wasn't quite a fair trial as we had an uneven number of friends. So we settled upon 20 each. Over the space of about a week we checked often with each other to see how many and who had accepted the request. As it turned out, it was 8/7 to me. Statistics said then, that 35-40% would accept the friend request. This gave me an idea.

I wondered, what would happen if this were done on a grander scale? How many people really would add a complete stranger, and why? The easiest way I found to do this would be to add friends of friends. I decided on a few rules:

• I would start on a Saturday and end on the following Sunday.
• I would choose 250 friends, and from each choose one friend
• This friend would be taken from the first 6 randomly displayed people on the friends profile

Seemed simple enough, but I realised 250 was a lot. I decided that because it was way too many, and for a few other reasons, I'd cut it down to an ever rounder 200. This made it a fair bit easier, so I wrote down all these names and for each I randomly picked one from each. I wanted a fair amount of men to women ration, and if I ever saw anyone particularly older, I'd choose them first. I will admit my scientific integrity slipped a couple times when I favoured a particular person over the others, but er... moving on...

I found my 200 and added them all. It took most of Saturday up. When I was only halfway through people had already begun adding me back. By the end of the first day 42 people had accepted the requests. By the end of the second day 60 had, then 68 the next. It slowed to a few a day, until the final total was 80 out of 200. As had been the case with mine and Graham's bet, 40% accepted the requests. So my curiosity was satiated about just how many people would accept a friend request from a complete stranger - nearly half. What confused me was the lack of questioning as to why I had added them. About 20 people asked if they knew me, and for the most part I kept it simple and said that they didn't, but that we had a mutual friend in common. They all seemed to accept this. There were a few who weren't quite as... open as that, and bluntly just asked how I was, so to these I fully explained what was going on. I think I freaked a few people out.

A fair few people responded to my messages, I'd take a guess at 30 - 40, and some I had quite lengthy conversations with. Initially I sent a generic message: "Hi [NAME], thanks for accepting the add. How are you?". I think this generally polite message might have been the reason why most people didn't message me back and say "Piss off, you nutter." Those who did message me back were all rather nice people. Even the ones who seemed a bit confused/angry/freaked out at first were all nice once I explained. I didn't quite get all the answers I wanted to, I still don't know why the majority of them did add me. If you're reading this, comment on my page and let me know!

This project didn't quite work out how I wanted to, but I definately enjoyed it, and hopefully have made some new friends from the whole thing. Though the point of this experiment was to find out whether people would add me and why, I was also looking forward to finding some interesting people along the way, and that I did.

Thanks to all 80 that added me, extra thanks to Adam; Alex; Beth; Billie-Jo; Charlotte; Colleen; Dan; Dani; Darren; Dave; Edwina; Emily; Francis; Gemma; Heather; Jade; Jessica; Judy; Kate; Katrina; Kaz; Kelsey; Kevin; Lauren; Louise; Matt; Melanie; Mirkku; Myles; Naomi; Paula; Rebecca; Richard; Rory; Sam; Sarah; Steve; Suzanne B and Suzanne S; Tage; Tasha; Tom and Tracy for getting back to me, but special thanks to Frances S & Joe H, who I'm mostly definately glad I met through this project. I hope to hear from all of you again soon!

If anyone isn't happy about their name being in this, let me know and I'll edit it out. Also, if anyone feels they want to remove me from their friends now, I'll be sad to see you go, but if that is what you want feel free.

ja ne~